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Thursday, March 12, 2015

#1314: Ryan Anderson

Ryan Anderson is a Heritage Foundation fellow and, as such, a zealous anti-gay activist. Marriage is a wonderful
thing, says Anderson, and is good for children. So therefore we must deny it to
gay couples. “But how can the law teach that fathers are essential if it
redefines marriage to make fathers optional? Redefining marriage diminishes the
social pressures for husbands to remain with their wives and children, and for
men and women to marry before having children?” asks Anderson,
apparently assuming that gays would cease to exist if there was no gay marriage
and enter into stable heterosexual marriages instead. And that’s even without
considering his refuted assumption that gays are bad parents.

He has also claimed that same-sex marriage is “an elite luxury good bought for on the backs of the
poor.” I don’t think that’s true. Indeed, I suspect Anderson don’t really think
that’s true, but you know. Nor do gays need
civil rights. Free markets, rather than nondiscrimination measures, will
protect LGBT people from employment and housing discrimination, according to
Anderson, since that has worked so well for minorities in the past. Indeed,
banning gay marriage doesn’t really take anything away from anyone, says Anderson – it is thus only heterosexual marriages that need legal protection.

Diagnosis: Yeah, that kind of guy. One gets the feeling that
Anderson is less than ideally intellectually honest in his bigotry, but I am
not sure that makes the bigotry worse.